Everything I Know About You Page 3

  Suddenly I understood about the room assignments.

  My stomach dropped down an elevator shaft.

  “Oh,” I blurted.

  “You know, Tally, people change,” Ms. Jordan said. “They grow up. Even boys.”

  “Not all of them!” My voice was too loud, but so what. “Some people stay horrible. And you definitely shouldn’t be forced to room with them. In a hotel!”

  “I agree,” she said quietly. “Some kids are best to avoid. But other kids deserve a second chance, don’t you think? Also, don’t you think it’s important to get out of your comfort zone a little, open yourself up to making new friends—”

  “Actually, I’m perfectly comfortable with my comfort zone! That’s why it’s a comfort zone!”

  Ms. Jordan did the kind of neutral expression they probably teach you in teacher school. “Well, Tally,” she finally said, in a fiftieth-percentile sort of voice, “I can see you’re a very caring person.”

  I still didn’t breathe. “Thank you.”

  “But you’re going to have to trust me on this, okay? We’ve given this a lot of thought; we’ve had plenty of input from the faculty, including Mr. Barkley, and I’m sure Mr. Gianelli and I can handle anything that comes up. Not that I expect anything to. Getting you guys to mix things up socially will be a wonderful way to build class unity. And I feel certain this trip will be a memorable— Oh, hello, girls.”

  Ava, Nadia, and Haley Spriggs had barged into the classroom. Without saying hello, or even looking at me, or asking if they were interrupting anything, they presented Ms. Jordan with a poster-sized floor plan of the Hotel Independence, which they’d found on the internet and annotated with blue and red Sharpie.

  “We know you’re doing room assignments for the trip,” Ava announced. “And my mom had this great idea. Since the whole third floor of the hotel is shaped like a T, if you assign these six rooms in this order—”

  Ms. Jordan stared at the names written on the floor plan in Ava’s perfect, squarish handwriting. “You did the room assignments yourselves?”

  “Only for our friends,” Ava said, pretending to sound apologetic. “We knew how crazy it would be fitting everyone into the floor plan. So we thought we’d help make you a chart.”

  “Like a graphic organizer,” Nadia added, using a social studies–type word.

  “Whoa,” I said. “You’re really serious, Ava?”

  “About what?” Ava asked innocently. She cocked her head like a tiny bird.

  “This floor plan, obviously. You think you get to decide—”

  “All right, Tally,” Ms. Jordan interrupted.

  “But this is just so wrong, Ms. Jordan!” I exploded. “I can’t be with my friends, but Ava gets to assign—”

  “No,” Ms. Jordan said. “Only teachers do the assigning.”

  “Wait, at the assembly you said you wanted information from us about rooming,” Ava reminded her. “And that’s why we thought—”

  Ms. Jordan held up both hands. “That’s not what I meant, but I guess I should have been more clear. And really, girls, this trip’s not about the hotel, and it’s not even just about exploring the capital. It’s about coming together as a grade: E pluribus unum, which is Latin for—”

  “ ‘This trip is going to suck’?” Nadia suggested.

  “No.” Ms. Jordan said, not smiling. “It means ‘Out of many, one.’ Maybe I’m being too idealistic here, but I really believe you guys can become one. For four days, anyway.”

  I ignored my teacher’s speech and snorted at Ava. “All you guys really care about is being with your friends. This whole ‘class unity’ thing is a pile of dog poop.”

  (I actually used that expression: pile of dog poop.)

  Ava folded her arms. “Tally, you did not just say that.”

  “Actually, Ava, I did.”

  “Okay, girls—” Ms. Jordan said.

  “No one meant to insult anyone,” Haley said. “We were just trying to make things easier.” She seemed upset, but of course, she was an actress, the best one in our grade.

  “And maybe we care about our friends because we have friends,” Nadia added. She flipped her straight dark hair over her shoulder for emphasis.

  “Are you saying I don’t have friends?” I said. “Because seriously, Nadia, that’s just the most preposterous—”

  “Oh, but Nadia didn’t mean that,” Haley jumped in.

  “Yeah, really? Because to me it sounded like that’s exactly what she meant.”

  “Stop. All of you.” Ms. Jordan took the floor plan from Ava’s hand and dropped it on her desk. “Thank you for the floor plan, girls. I’ll look at it later.”

  “You will?” I said. “What for?”

  “Tally, all I said was I’ll look at it. I’m not promising anyone anything, okay?”

  But Ava beamed. “Oh, you’re very welcome, Ms. Jordan,” she said.

  Folded Pieces of White Paper

  RIGHT THEN I GAVE UP. On everything: Rooming with my friends. The trip. Definitely Ms. Jordan. The way I saw it, she was about to do one of two things, both utterly horrible.

  Either she’d go along with Ava’s bossy, obnoxious floor chart, which would be unfair to everyone who wasn’t a clonegirl. (For example, me. And Sonnet. And, of course, Spider.)

  Or—and this would be even worse—she’d come up with a room arrangement that basically assigned you to your enemy. Because it was clear Ms. Jordan had some sort of demented newbie-teacher idea about getting people to socialize. Like she thought all you had to do was throw two kids together in a room, chant the magic words “class unity,” and, poof, instant friends. No grudges, no bad memories. Why hadn’t Mr. Gianelli explained to her that this experiment—or whatever it was—would never work? And also the principal—didn’t he understand the first thing about middle school?

  I went into the girls’ bathroom, flipped the spirit tee inside out, and tied the banana bandanna around my neck.

  • • •

  In homeroom, right before dismissal, Ms. Jordan handed out folded pieces of white paper, taped shut. Some kids just stuffed the paper in their pocket to open later, but most opened their papers immediately and groaned. Or shouted something that wasn’t a curse (but would’ve been if we were outside school). Or just rolled their eyes.

  I’m not sure why, but I had the feeling I’d need to read my paper in privacy. So I took it to the back of the room.

  Talia Martin, your roommate is Ava Seeley.

  I swallowed.

  Ms. Jordan was watching me with calm, serious eyes.

  Across the room, surrounded by her army of clonegirls, Ava Seeley was glaring at me.

  And now Sonnet was running over. She looked pale and her eyes were huge. “Tally,” she said “Look!”

  She gave me her paper. Sonnet Kobayashi, your roommate is Haley Spriggs.

  “How did she know?” Sonnet murmured. “I mean, why Haley out of everybody?”

  I shook my head. “Ms. Jordan said they talked to other teachers. This is all on purpose, to try to make us bond, or something. Don’t worry, we don’t have to.”

  “Well, maybe it won’t be so bad,” Sonnet said in a small voice. She sounded as if she were trying to convince herself but was too smart to fall for it.

  All of a sudden, then, I thought of something, and my stomach twisted.

  “Come on, we have to find Spider,” I muttered, grabbing Sonnet’s arm.

  We raced out of the room and down the hall to Mr. G’s room. Spider was already walking toward us; his face was pale, with the kind of smile that wasn’t a smile.

  He handed me his room assignment: Marco Sarris.

  The Dirty Work

  SPIDER AND I HAD BEEN best friends since we were toddlers, playing in the sandbox together at Eastview Park. Back then, when he was Caleb, if some kid stole his shovel, he’d turn purple and just start yelling and sobbing, and I’d have to get it back for him. Even if it meant punching the kid.

  “Tally,
hitting isn’t nice,” Mom would tell me on the way home from the park. “And anyway, Caleb needs to stand up for himself.”

  “But he won’t,” I’d reply.

  “He won’t because he thinks he doesn’t have to. You’re doing all the dirty work for him.”

  I remember thinking about that expression: “dirty work.” Yes, we’d been playing in the sandbox, and now we were dirty. So getting his shovel back was dirty work.

  But I never minded the dirty work of looking after him. My family took care of me, and I took care of Caleb; the world just made sense to me that way. The thing was, I always knew I was adopted, so I always had this idea that love was choosing to take care of someone—not just family, but friends, too.

  And Caleb needed me: He had no dad, and his mom was not very understanding. All his crying made her constantly scold him and correct him. When we were in fifth grade, some dumb relative told her that if Caleb kept hanging around with me, he’d “turn gay,” like you could catch it from being friends with girls. So the next fall she signed him up for Little League, even though he had zero interest in baseball.

  The worst part was that I couldn’t protect him from very much. The coach, who happened to be Marco’s dad, stuck him in left field, and of course it was a disaster. Even if Caleb saw balls coming at him (which he did maybe half the time) his short, skinny arms and legs wouldn’t cooperate. He couldn’t run fast enough; he’d trip; the ball would go through his legs. Or he’d catch it and drop it. Or he’d catch it, not drop it, but trip as he was throwing it.

  Marco and Trey did most of the teasing. They called Caleb “Spider” because he moved “like he’s nothing but legs,” they said. They even made up a Spider dance, which consisted of flailing their arms and legs like one of those inflatable tube guys you see outside car dealerships, and then falling facedown on the outfield grass.

  Soon the whole team was doing the Spider dance.

  And did Marco’s dad stop them? No.

  One day they teased Caleb so much, he had a panic attack right out there on the field, in front of everyone. I wasn’t at the game, because I hated baseball even more than Caleb did. But I found out about it the next day at school, when all the kids were talking about how he basically collapsed in the batter’s box and couldn’t catch his breath. An asthma attack, people called it. But if there was a difference between that and a panic attack, I didn’t know what it was.

  By sixth grade, I was already five foot eight, tall as a grown-up. Mom told me I was “big-boned,” but I was muscly, too, with a squishy belly and a big butt. When I marched over to Marco and Trey and told them to quit it with the Spider dance, they immediately turned on me, calling me SuperSize and Big Bird. (“Yeah, I’m big, you subatomic particles,” I sneered back at them.) Then they started making spiders out of pipe cleaners, dropping them down Caleb’s back, and on his head, and also on his desk and on his lunch tray. Sometimes they even caught real spiders and used them instead. Caleb had this general bug phobia, so whenever he discovered these (mostly dead) spider “gifts,” his face would turn white and he’d start gasping and wheezing.

  “Ooh, spiders, I’m such a scared wittle girl—where’s my big stwong Tallyguard?” Trey said in this cartoon falsetto.

  I loomed and glared, but it didn’t work. And I knew that if I didn’t take some kind of forceful action, the next time Caleb had baseball practice could end up even worse.

  So I punched Trey in the mouth.

  Mr. Barkley gave me a two-day suspension, but I didn’t care. The bullying stopped, and Marco even apologized, for Trey and for himself.

  “It won’t happen again,” he told me. “I promise.”

  “Why should I believe you?” I growled.

  Marco looked right at me, and for the first time I noticed that his eyes were olive green, and that he had thick black eyelashes.

  “Because I’m not a liar,” he said quietly.

  Which struck me as a funny thing to say. I mean, if you’re a bully.

  In the middle of sixth grade, Marco got put in accelerated math somehow, so of course he realized it was my subject. That’s when he started calling me Math Girl. And I decided to let him, because math was what mattered to me, who I actually was. The size thing always felt kind of alien, in a funny way—like I had nothing to do with it; it was just my body. My size had more to do with my biological mother, Marisa, a person I’d never even met. And really, no matter how you looked at it, Math Girl was a compliment. It meant I was smart.

  That was also when I decided to start calling my best friend “Spider.” Over the summer we’d found out that we’d be in separate classes for seventh grade, and I was worried about how he’d be without me. So I decided Caleb needed a new identity.

  “Tally, are you crazy?” he protested. “That’s an insult!”

  “It doesn’t have to be,” I told him. “Just think about it, okay? Spiderwebs look weak, but they’re incredibly strong! And spider bites are painful. Plus, think of Spider-Man. I’ll call you Spider in recognition of your powers.”

  He made a sound like pfft. “My what?”

  “Come on,” I said, poking him. “If you want Spider to stop being a negative, just turn it into a positive!”

  “You mean by making it my name?”

  I sighed. Sometimes he could be really stubborn.

  “Listen, Caleb, I can’t do everything for you, you know,” I said. “You have to do some dirty work for yourself, all right?”

  He thought about it. “Yeah, all right,” he finally said. “Go ahead. Call me Spider.”

  That’s how much he trusted me. And so far, the first week of seventh grade, it seemed to be working. No one, not even Marco and Trey, was bothering him, at least not in front of me. Basically, he’d become invisible, and that’s not the worst thing, if you’ve been bullied.

  But I knew how easily the bullying could happen again, especially on this trip. Especially if Spider was rooming with Marco—who was one iota better than Trey, although really, that wasn’t saying much.

  Clonegirl

  THAT NIGHT AT DINNER, I told my parents about Ms. Jordan’s Evil Room Assignments, how she’d deliberately put me with Ava, Sonnet with Haley, and, worst of all, Spider with Marco.

  “Seriously, Mom, you should complain to the principal,” Fiona said. “Teachers aren’t supposed to behave like this.”

  “Yes, maybe I should,” Mom said. I could see she was thinking out loud. “Although Ms. Jordan is a new teacher, so complaining to the principal is a very big deal. It’s sort of like she’s on probation this year. Maybe we should try to give her a chance.”

  “But Ava Seeley is horrible,” Fiona said, catching my eye. “You don’t know, Mom.”

  “No, but I’ve met her mother.” Mom smiled. You could tell she had an opinion she wasn’t sharing. Except that by not sharing it, she was sharing it, really. “She started that business where she criticizes your clothes.”

  “She what?” I shouted. “What kind of a business is that?”

  Mom laughed. “Ellen’s sort of a wardrobe consultant, I think. Or a professional woman’s life coach–type person. Something one-on-one where she comes to your house, goes through your closets, and gives you advice about how to look. Mostly for business, I think. But anyway, Tally, what’s wrong with Ava?”

  “Everything,” I declared. “She’s bossy, she’s secretly mean, she’s stuck up, she thinks she’s perfect, she dresses like a clonegirl—”

  “A what?”

  “Super fashionable, but exactly the same as everyone else. No originality, no personality. Like it’s all been dictated to her from TV and these dumb fashion magazines she’s always reading. And if you don’t dress like that, she decides you’re weird. Also, she makes fun of my size,” I added.

  At that, everyone stopped eating and looked at me. Because I’m adopted, I don’t look like the rest of the family. We all have dark hair and tan skin, but the difference is they’re small. Small-boned, Mom calls it,
as if they’re all birds. And they’re sensitive about my size. I mean, about how people react to my size.

  “She makes fun of you?” Dad asked. “What does she say?”

  “Nothing specific,” I admitted. “But she always looks at me a certain way, like she thinks I’m big just to personally annoy her or something. She always makes these snide comments about how I dress. And when she gave me the tee, she said it was a large. Like this: Larrrrge.”

  “Hmm,” Mom said. “Tally, have you tried sharing how you feel with Ms. Jordan?”

  “A million times!” I said. “I even brought her muffins! Now she’s sick of me and refuses to discuss it.”

  Mom and Dad exchanged glances. It was like their brains were having a private conversation.

  “Well,” Dad finally said. “It looks to me like there are three options here, Tally. One, you stay home.”

  “Dad, that’s unacceptable!” Fiona shouted. “Let Ava stay home! Why should Tally have to?”

  “Yeah,” I said, chomping on a carrot stick. “You only get one big seventh grade trip.”

  “Two,” Dad continued, “Mom and I complain to the principal.”

  I shook my head. “It won’t make any difference. Ms. Jordan said he’s all for it.”

  Which was true. But I was also thinking about how I was still in semi-trouble with Mr. Barkley for wearing a red fedora in school last week, even after he’d told me to take it off. Possibly I was in trouble for other fashion crimes too, and I knew he was always waiting for me to punch someone else on Spider’s behalf. So I wasn’t super eager for any parent-principal interaction.

  “Okay, three,” Dad said. “You go on the trip and share a room with Ava at night, when you’re asleep and won’t even notice her, and you spend the daytime touring Washington and hanging out with your friends.”

  “I know which option I’d pick,” Mom said. “But it’s your choice, sweetheart.”

  My family looked at me, waiting for my answer. I could tell they wanted me to pick option three, but I knew they’d support me whatever I decided. That was how they were, really, about everything. The total opposite of Spider’s mom.